Movie Reviews
Elf
… is a wonderful idea: a man raised by elves at the North Pole, until he grows too large and sets out to discover his real father (James Caan). Bob Newhart and Ed Asner as Santa do a good job, but the movies lives or dies with Will Farrell, who is delightfully wide-eyed, apologizing when he’s hit by a car while jaywalking, or falling afoul of the world’s nastiest kids’ book author in ... Read more »
Elephant
A very interesting but maddening film. Gus van Sant has made a documentary-like portrait of one day at a high school that ends very much like Columbine. His point, and it’s a good one, is that it was an ordinary day, and we see ten or twelve students of different types. Who will live and who will die? There is no rhyme or reason behind any of it; some got lucky and some didn’t. They ran ... Read more »
Fever Pitch
This was the first feature at the drive in; the second was The Pacifier. What we got was a film-school double feature: How to write comedy, and how not to write comedy.
The only reason I can see why anyone would not love this movie is that they absolutely hate baseball. Sort of the way Lee reacted to Read more »
El Dorado
El Dorado (1966) We were getting near the end of the popularity of that durable genre film, the western. We were only a few years from The Wild Bunch and some others that gave a newer and more realistic look at what the West was really like. This is one of the last gasps of the traditional view, where it mattered how fast you were on the draw (most shooting in ... Read more »
Fellini: I’m a Born Liar
Not long before he died Federico Fellini did a longish interview on film. About half of this movie is that interview. The rest is scenes from his films, intercut with present-day shots of the locations, scenes of him directing, and interviews with people who worked with him. It is by no means a biographical movie. Not much is said about his life or career. Instead, it is the creative ... Read more »
Feet First
Harold Lloyd’s second “talkie,” one of only seven he made. He’s a shoe salesman in Honolulu who aspires to better things, and the story contains his usual physical humor combined with his attempts to squirm out of embarrassing social situations. It’s most noteworthy for an extended scene that looks even more perilous than his stunts in Safety Last!, which ... Read more »
The Fearless Vampire Killers
This is the film Roman Polanski made before his huge hit Rosemary’s Baby. It didn’t fare so well, mostly because MGM had no idea what to do with it. When I first saw it, they had given it the awful title The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck. This was totally at odds with what kind of film it is, ... Read more »
Father of Invention
Kevin Spacey is Robert Axle, a TV pitchman who has built a $1.6 billion-dollar company on the strength of his inventions, which are always the fusion of two products already on the market. We see his pitch at the beginning, showing several silly products. My favorite is a camera that also shoots pepper spray, so you can disable a mugger and take his picture at the same time. But one of his ... Read more »
Eight Men Out
Baseball’s blackest moment was in 1919, when players on the Chicago White Sox took money to throw the World Series. This movie lays it all out as it happened, game by game, and does a swell job of it. Without in any way apologizing for the conduct of the players, it should be pointed out (and the movie does so) that the team owner, Charles “The Other Cocksucker” Comiskey, treated his ... Read more »
Farewell
In the age of Reagan, Mitterand, and just before Gorbachev, a Russian in the KGB is fed up with the Soviet Union and hopes to force a change by passing some very high-level data to the French. As his go-between he picks a French engineer in Moscow with no ties to any spy agency, and thus without a KGB dossier. It is “based on fact,” as they say, and this time they may not have jazzed it up ... Read more »